Indies Squeezed Out of XBLA?
This was reported on joystiq - Greg Canessa, general manager of XBLA, now has this to say:

"As the business has grown, we now are swamped--completely swamped--with folks that want in Arcade, large publishers and small publishers alike .... the Capcoms, Namcos, Midways, Konamis, EAs--those types of guys were like, 'Yeah, maybe one or two titles.' Now they're coming out with us saying, 'oh, we wanna do 25 titles. We wanna do 20 titles. We're starting up a division to do arcade titles.' So we have a huge amount of opportunities from the large publishers. Not just back-catalog stuff... The retro stuff is part of it, but it's also new content they wanna develop for arcade..."

So the indies blazed the trail, won big. I don't know if anybody was expecting XBLA to be as huge of a success as it is turning out to be. So now the big publishers are ready to fight like a giant pack of starving dogs over a chunk of steak. The big winners will be the consumers, so I can't find fault with that aspect. But I do worry that the indies are going to get squeezed out of XBLA development. Harsh.

But it's not all doom-and-gloom for indies. We have two things going for us:

#1 - I don't know if the big publishers have figured out how to make the inexpensive downloadable game formula work. They still have high overheads, and not every game is going to perform like Geometry Wars (though, undoubtably, some will perform better as the platform matures). But the big publishers have a bigger overhead - so they can't make the same game as cheaply as an indie. And they can't just "spend their way to the top" with XBLA games as they can a standard retail title. Well, maybe they can't. But most of the cost of development is in content these days, and there are some hard limits on the amount of content that can be downloaded with an XBLA title. That levels the playing field somewhat. But it's all in marketing...

But I still expect Microsoft to give preference to big publishers over an indie title, if everything else was equal in a crowded month.

#2 - The runaway success of XBLA legitimizes downloadable games in a BIG way. Not that we really needed much in the way of legitimization, but it establishes the business model in the minds of hardcore gamers. There is a place to get games besides the local GameStop, EB, or Wal*Mart. And it's fast, easy, and worthwhile.

Labels: Biz, Indie Evangelism

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 6:50 PM (Permalink)